Posts tagged interview

I don’t mind admitting to having a really pleasant surprise with this company. I had never heard of Frog before, which seems quite strange considering how big they seem to be in the UK. Frog had a huge stand at BETT, with loads of people working for them, and looking at their product you can see why.

Frog is a virtual learning environment (VLE) that has something of the social network about it, something of Google IG, something of English360, and generally speaking looks really nice. It’s not really possible in just a short four or five-minute demonstration to get a good in depth idea of the strengths and weaknesses of something as complicated as a VLE, but the first impressions of frog were very good. What’s more, the guy that I got to do an interview for Digitalang was none other than the CEO Gareth Davies.

I asked Gareth the same three questions I asked everyone else: “Why do you come to BETT”, “What have you been talking to people about most?” and ” What are you doing to make teachers’ lives easier?” I thought Gareth gave some good answers.

For the third in my series of Best of the BETT interviews I spoke to Anne Gilleran, from eTwinning.net. I’m happy to say that amongst the hundreds stalls at BETT, eTwinning’s area was a real breath of fresh air. Their service is a real help for language teachers who want their students to get some authentic speaking practice, it’s also huge (currently there are more than 150,000 members) and best of all it’s free. In their own words:

eTwinning is the Community for schools in Europe. Teachers from all participating countries can register and use the eTwinning online tools (the Portal and the Desktop) to find each other, meet virtually, exchange ideas and practice examples, team up in Groups, learn together in Learning Events and engage in online-based projects.

I’m a big fan of free stuff that makes teachers’ lives easier and I’ll definitely now be looking into eTwinning.net further. I’d like to see how I could work it into some of the seminars I teach at the moment.

Anyhow, over to Anne, who describes (in a very noisy BETT conference hall) exactly what eTwinning.net does:

Tomorrow’s post will be my last, but I’ve saved the “big one” or scoop until then. I was very lucky to get an interview with William Florance, the head of Education at Google for Europe The Middle East and Asia.

In this second in our series of interviews from the BETT 2012 interviews, we hear form Simon Lee, the UK Head of Sales for Livescribe, the manufacturer of the incredible SmartPen.

I use a Livescribe SmartPen myself, and I can attest to how useful they are for helping you to concentrate on what is being said, not taking notes and so on in meetings. More importantly though, at least for this blog, they’re invaluable in 1to1 language lessons, where the teacher will be able to quickly and simply play back errors to the learner, so that can correct themselves, whether it be pronunciation, vocabulary or grammar mistakes. Without fail, after every single sales meeting I do for English360, the people I’m talking to ask “what’s that amazing pen?” or something along those lines!

In this interview, Simon tells us why Livescribe came to BETT and what teachers have been hearing from him this year:

The next interview in this series will be with Gareth Davies, the CEO of an amazing virtual learning environment that I’d never heard of before, Frog. Great name – and not a bad looking VLE either 🙂

BETT (The British Educational Training and Technology show) is one of Europe’s biggest EdTech shows. It’s been going for close to 30 years, attracts almost 30,000 visitors each year with a round about 700 different companies exhibiting there. In the madness that was BETT 2012. It was very easy to feel overwhelmed. As an antidote to my mystification, I set myself a task – find the top 5 most interesting, relevant, or influential stands at the show and interview someone important there for my dear blog readers. So, over the next 5 days, I’m going to post one video interview per day with a key BETT player, starting today with Chris Klein, the Educational Consultant and Macintosh Specialist for SMART Technologies, one of the leading IWB (Interactive White Board) manufacturers.

SMART had a huge, and I mean huge presence at BETT. At a guess I’d say they had 50-60 odd people working at their stall at any one time. You know what, they were all busy, all of the time, too! SMART were showcasing their soon to be released Notebook software version 11, which had some amazing features. My favourite feature I think was the web mash-ups, which allowed you to bring streaming video, Google maps, online flas animation and seemingly any other internet based content directly into your IWB pages. It really was very impressive and a big leap up from the Notebook 10 software. Kudos to them!

Well, Chris very kindly agreed to do a short interview on film. I thought I’d make it a bit of a level playing field and asked him and all the other stall holders the same questions:

Why do you / your company come to BETT?

What have you been talking about most to the teachers and other people here?

How are you making teachers’ lives easier?

So to kick off our short series of video interviews, which took place in a very noisy conference hall, so there’s a fair bit of background noise, it’s over to you, Chris:

Thanks once again Chris for talking to everyone who couldn’t make it! And in tomorrow’s post we’ll have Simon Lee, from the incredible LiveScribe company, manufacturers of SmartPens (one of my favourite gadgets it has to be said!)

Update: This post has been entered as part of the “Ed Tech Carnival” being run by Danny Nicholson over on The Whiteboard Blog. The carnival should be published in early February 2012, so take a look over there for more useful Ed Tech articles.